ABSTRACT
Urban centers throughout the Pacific Basin had begun to feel the shifts in the global economy by the end of the nineteenth century. The railroad, the steamship, the telegraph penetrated the cultures of Asia with more than just Western science, technology, and philosophy. With the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the European window on Asia was effectively closed. The Europeans of the Mediterranean world felt this loss sorely, for without an alternative trade route to the East, they faced the high costs of a series of commercial intermediaries. The Chinese authorities demanded that the sailors be turned over to them for trial, creating a crisis in what had become an increasingly provocative issue in China's "barbarian relations": the question of national jurisdiction. The mere fact that the treaties at last required China to deal as a diplomatic equal with the barbarians did not mean it had altered its assumption of national superiority.
